2022-2023 The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal―and How to Set Them Right

The historic Greensboro, North Carolina lunch counter Sit-in on February 1, 1960 is one of the most well known incidents in Civil Rights history. This singular event was universally credited to four young men from North Carolina A&T State University. Significantly, the integration of public accommodations of that city and many cities followed. Belles of Liberty: Gender, Bennett College and the Civil Rights Movement recalls a more complete story, illuminating what historians overlooked: that the first Sit-in in Greensboro was carefully planned on Bennett College's campus, and without hundreds of women who sat down, marched and were incarcerated from 1960 to 1963, the Sit-in effort and subsequent desegregation of Greensboro and even other cities, might not have succeeded.

Black college football began during the nadir of African American life after the Civil War. The first game occurred in 1892, a little less than four years before the Supreme Court ruled segregation legal in Plessy v. Ferguson. In spite of Jim Crow segregation, Black colleges produced some of the best football programs in the country. They mentored young men who became teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors--not to mention many other professions--and transformed Black communities. But when higher education was integrated, the programs faced existential challenges as predominately white institutions steadily set about recruiting their student athletes and hiring their coaches. Blood, Sweat, and Tears explores the legacy of Black college football, with Florida A&M's Jake Gaither as its central character, one of the most successful coaches in its history. A paradoxical figure, Gaither led one of the most respected Black college football programs, yet many questioned his loyalties during the height of the civil rights movement. Among the first broad-based histories of Black college athletics, Derrick E. White's sweeping story complicates the heroic narrative of integration and grapples with the complexities and contradictions of one of the most important sources of Black pride in the twentieth century.

James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.

The North Carolina A&T State University book reflects an impressive illustration of the broad teaching, research, and service aspects of the university. In 1891, the university began as the Agricultural and Mechanical Arts College for the Colored Race at Shaw University. As an 1890 land-grant institution--historically black colleges that were established under the Second Morrill Act--the university's purpose was to provide education in agriculture, home economics, mechanical arts, and professions relative to the era. From our humble beginnings until now, the university has adopted an uncompromising expectation of integrity and excellence among our students, faculty, staff, and alumni. A&T has historically produced socially conscious, globally prepared, and competent leaders. NC A&T remains committed to fulfilling the fundamental purposes of the land-grant university through exemplary undergraduate and graduate instruction, scholarly and creative research, and effective public service and engagement.

For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States. In this book, Jelani M. Favors offers a history of HBCUs from the 1837 founding of Cheyney State University to the present, told through the lens of how they fostered student activism. Favors chronicles the development and significance of HBCUs through stories from institutions such as Cheyney State University, Tougaloo College, Bennett College, Alabama State University, Jackson State University, Southern University, and North Carolina A&T. He demonstrates how HBCUs became a refuge during the oppression of the Jim Crow era and illustrates the central role their campus communities played during the civil rights and Black Power movements. Throughout this definitive history of how HBCUs became a vital seedbed for politicians, community leaders, reformers, and activists, Favors emphasizes what he calls an unwritten "second curriculum" at HBCUs, one that offered students a grounding in idealism, racial consciousness, and cultural nationalism.